A Study of the First Year: The View of "Folk" in the Movie of Hou Hsiao hsien: Focus on『The Puppetmaster』
The term 'Folk' as used in this article is closer to 'method' rather than 'subject'. The world of characters' life in Hou Hsiao hsien's movies is a 'the world of folk' that has been formed in traditional society and is undergoing modern order but still being maintained. It means "non-scientific" world which has otherness as "pre-modern" by the modern knowledge system, or the way it was conveyed socially from before modern times, or such a sense of life. The folk way is closer to wisdom than knowledge, empirical rather than rational, and communal rather than personal.
The folk motives in the movie are expressed in four ways.
1. Fate: The life of Tien Lu's grandmother is so unfortunate that only things that are hard to explain still happen, such as the sudden death of three children (son, grandchild and daughter) who wanted to live together in the latter years. She slept for ten days, but the physicians did not find anything physically wrong. When a grandmother lost consciousness, an elderly person in the neighborhood gave this advice to Tien Lu, saying, "You are fortunate that you were born with the Kuixing constellation, otherwise you'd be dead because of your grandmother." There is an opposition between modern and rational thinking and wisdom of 'folk'.
2. Folk remedies: One day, the lips of Tien Lu' s lover, Liju, had an abscess and was swollen to such an extent that he could not recognize her face. Tien Lu recalled what he had heard before, and he caught a frog full of buckets, opened the frog‘s stomach, covered it on the patient's face, and repeated it until dawn to change and change the frog when it dried. As the day was just dawning, and the Liju‘s fever went down and regained consciousness. Of course, there was a war situation at that time, so it was difficult to get western medicine treatment, but the effect of 'folk' remedy was excellent here.
3. Friendship: Tien Lu's son was taken to the police station because he snatched a small sweet fish and sold it in the market. At that time, small sweet fish under six months in Taiwan were prohibited from capturing. The chief of police released the young son of Tien Lu, it was a tolerance for a young son and a friendship expression about Tien Lu. On the one hand, it can be said that the relationship between the colonists and the colonized has been romanticized, but the failure to punish the young son of a friend is clearly a 'folk' way that transcends the legal relationship.
4. People‘s livelihood: After the war, Tien Lu, who is on the way, witnesses Taiwanese disassembling military aircraft at the airport. If it is the national way to bring war, make weapons, and mobilize the people to war, it is a thoroughly ‘folk’ way to sell scrap metal for aluminum by disassembling the plane, a symbol of war. This is because civilians do not need fighters.
A Study of the Second Year: 「Visible and Invisible: Edward Yang's 『Yi Yi, A One And A Two』 subscribe in detail」
Edward Yang's 『Yi Yi, A One And A Two』 is a movie about the universal humanity of humans. A young child in the movie, Yangyang, says that she took a picture and showed it to them because people cannot see their own back. It is the destiny of man that he cannot see himself in his own back, and this is a wonderful metaphor for the 'subjectivism' which a man has.
The discourse about visibility such as the modernity of visual, the relationship between visual and cognition, and the visual and power are very diverse. In this study, we tried to interpret the problem of 'visual' in the movie by concentrating on text rather than generalization and the specific problem awareness is as follows. (1) We focused on the limit of human being who cannot see 'half of truth' which Yangyang pointed out in the movie, and proceeded to discuss it in the viewpoint about 'human nature'. (2) What does Yangyang's obsession with "seeing" mean? We tried to solve this problem by connecting it with the opposition problem of the world view around modernity. (3) The director uses aesthetic appropriately 'exposing' and 'concealing'. Here we discussed 'what is visible' and 'what is invisible' in the viewpoint of 'screen' rather than 'narrative'.
Edward has said that his film-oriented style usually depicts the life of Taipei people. 『Yi Yi, A One And A Two』 is a very complete picture of the family living in Taipei. The flow of narrative seems to have been in mind of 'circulation', which can be seen from the fact that the life motif of human affairs such as marriage → birth → full moon → murder → funeral is arranged in a balanced manner.
Edward describes the Taipei people who are confined to religion or Confucian tradition through the opposition of 'what is visible' and 'what is invisible'. We speculate that the director is saying that despite the economic success of Taiwan, there is a premodern aspect of the Taipei people's reasoning and actions. The skepticism of Yangyang, who believes only what is visible in such a way, will create a modern and independent new human.